A Mother’s Tips: How to Raise a Thiel Fellow

Editor’s Note: Silicon Valley visionary Peter Thiel was one of the first investors in Facebook and has backed many of today’s hottest tech companies. Today, Thiel offers budding entrepreneurs the chance to win a $100,000 fellowship, if only they drop out of college. In 2011, Dale Stephens was one of 20 individuals to win the first Thiel Fellowship. His mother, Lisa Nalbone, shares childrearing advice.

Photo: Tyler Driscoll

Thiel Fellow Dale Stephens

Here are 20 tips on how to raise a Thiel fellow, based on my experience of raising Dale J. Stephens, Thiel Fellow and founder of "UnCollege.”

1. Be a gate opener, not a gatekeeper. Give and allow access to information and to the world.

2. Prepare for lots of discussion. Nothing is really off-limits.

3. Accept analysis: always thinking, talking about how to make things better and finding better ways to do things — more cost effectively, more efficiently and just differently.

4. Discuss and stay engaged in news and politics and think about issues like hunger, housing, equality, justice and education — and how they could lead to change if [insert child’s incredible idea here] came into play. Discuss, do not pontificate.

5. Welcome participation in just about everything from very early on. (Note: This can be difficult for control freaks raised by control freaks of an earlier generation!)

6. Sleep less, question more and answer more questions.

7. Go against the grain.

8. Be ready to explain and defend both yourself and your kid, diplomatically and repeatedly.

9. Be thick-skinned.

10. Drive! Drive and wait — a lot.

11. Put time and attention into getting the young visionary where and what they need before your own parental wants. Help them differentiate between needs and wants.